Mad Enchantment#
Ross King
Rating: 4.0 / 5
Another great biography by Ross King of a singularly great individual in an extraordinary time, this time following Claude Monet as he works on his final masterpiece during World War I. Other than some over-tedious recounting of finances and some tangential visitors, King presented this narrative in an engaging and informative manner. Reading this was an inspiring start to 2025.
The Man With the Golden Gun#
Ian Fleming
Rating: 3.75 / 5
Another fun original novel, the last of Fleming’s James Bond series. I feel no need to provide much commentary on this classic, but I will note for my future retrospection that it was a nice, simple read while under evacuation for the Eaton Canyon Fire in January 2025. Specifically, it felt appropriate that this be the book I read in my childhood bed with just my flashlight as a distraction from the anxiety and powerlessness.
Operation Mincemeat1#
Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.25 / 5
This is my first of what I can only hope will be many of Macintyre’s espionage biographies. He masterfully organizes the multi-pronged story into a novel-esque thriller. Full of detail and background, it was easy to keep the characters and plot organized in my head. This famous story is worth reading by anyone who enjoy’s spy-thriller novels, fiction and non-fiction, alike. (Funny enough, having just gotten into the Bond series, Ian Fleming plays a role in the real Operation Mincemeat.)
Depth Charge#
Jason Heaton
Rating: 4.0 / 5
Overall, this book delivers on the promise of a dive-themed thriller. It’s not the world’s greatest thriller, but you definitely get what you paid for. The plot is intriguing and fun, the characters are well-defined (though I had difficulty telling some of them apart at the beginning). It was a quick read and I enjoyed it.
I came to this book as a fan of the author, Jason Heaton’s, podcast The Grey Nato, curious to read his first novel. He clearly took to heart the “write what you know” advice – diving, watches, Sri Lanka, Land Rovers and Land Cruisers, winter in the MidWest, and even being left-handed. While perhaps distracting at times, as a fan, it was fun to get these little “shout-outs” sprinkled throughout the novel. Yet, while I generally enjoyed the writing style, there were places where the prose was a bit clunky, particularly when the author needed to provide technical background information (e.g., on saturation diving). The style would jump from a narrative to a non-fiction, informational tone and back. I look forward to reading Heaton’s follow-on novel, Sweetwater.
The Nazi Conspiracy#
Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch
Rating: 2.5 / 5
I am somewhat torn on how to review this book. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t what was advertised by the subtitle “The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.” Of course, the Nazi plot was discussed, but most of the book was about the scheduling and running of the meeting of the Big Three Allied Forces leaders in Tehran. The authors provided good background on the war (though there were some miscellaneous tangents on various battles and events in WWII) and the decisions made leading up to and at the conference, but the assassination plot was really a minority of the book. In fact, there was very little information on the conspiracy at all, mostly a spattering of pieces of the puzzle without a primary narrative. So while it was a fairly quick and engaging read, I felt like it didn’t deliver on the promise of the title, subtitle, summary, and many many cliff-hanger and foreshadowing statements. And that brings me to another annoyance I had with the book: it’s a series of short (1-3 pages) chapters with a paragraph of lead-in and lead-out, usually a not-so-subtle foreshadowing of great intrigue to come. I’m not against using short paragraphs, but it is a style that requires great skill that I think the authors were unable to capture. Also, the foreshadowing was very aggressive in promising incredible tales of espionage and plot-twists with very little follow-through. In fact, it may be in part while I feel like this book under-delivered – almost every paragraph ended with such great expectations.
Overall, I would recommend reading this if you are interested in the meeting of these three WWII leaders and some of their interplay, but if you come in expecting a tale of espionage of the likes of Ben McIntyre, you will be disappointed.
Currently reading:
- Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose
- Eight Little Piggies by Stephen J. Gould
If you enjoyed the book, don’t bother with the recent Netflix move. I was looking forward to enjoying what I expected to be a high-quality movie based on this book, but was completely disappointed by the incredible deviation from the original story. I fail to understand why the director, writers, etc. thought they needed to make such dramatic alterations, but they made massive changes to the plot and characters, including an underlying tension between Montagu and Cholmondeley (and random sexual scenes that were just distracting and added nothing of value). I didn’t finish the movie because, as it strayed further from the true story as it went along, I was worried it would disrupt my memory and recall of the true events. ↩︎